TL 4000 SAS connection issues.

Question

Brand New TL 4000 unit. 4 drives, LTO6. Win 2012 Server (not R2). latest DPM 2012.

SAS card is a Perc 810. Two of course.

Library is configured as one library. All drives powered on, one control path set on drive 1. Latest drivers installed from dell website, installed install_nonexclusive as the readme says to do for DPM. Says successful install.

Can not get the media changer to show up in Device Manager. As a result, the library is not showing up in DPM. All I see is stand alone drives

The manual is extremely vague on some very important simple things. Like what is actually drive 1? the bottom drive I assume. Next, while it shows how to connect one drive to the host card....I don't see anything about how to do 4. So your left wondering if you need to daisy chain the 4 drives or ... ???

Anyways, Mr. google tells me 4 drives need two SAS cards. Ok, done. Still no go.

So for troubleshooting purposes, I removed all but one drive, and sure enough, still no media changer, and dpm still doesn't see library. I gave up and put our old HP back in.

What am I doing wrong?

newf123mp3 · Answer

Anyone?

newf123mp3 · Answer

I seem to be answering my own questions but for any other poor soul in the same situation not getting any answers - Perc cards do not work.  Need SAS HBA. My only concern now is that the lights on the back of the SAS card are orange and not green.

DELL-Sam L · Answer

Hello newf123mp3,

Yes you are correct in that a PERC 810 card will not see your TL2000 and that you need to get SAS 6gb HBA’s. The reason that the PERC card doesn’t see the TL4000’s drives is that it is looking for HDD’s so that it can create a raid array. The PERC 810 cards don’t have an option on them to switch to pass through when there isn’t a raid array connected. Here is also our support matrix that list out the compatible HBA’s for your TL4000. downloads.dell.com/.../Dell_PowerVault_Compatibility_Matrix_en-us.pdf

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

newf123mp3 · Answer

so orange lights on the SAS card is normal? should they not be green?

klimon · Answer

Sam-L  -- You forgot to answer the main question which is how many HBA's are needed for the TL4000 if it has 4 sleds installed? How many are needed if you have 2 Sleds? Also what would the HBA wiring diagram be for the TL4000 using 2 sleds or 4 sleds..

tapelibraryfixer · Answer

If you have 4x drives you can use a SAS cable that goes 1 into 4 connections as 1x SAS connection has for lanes and 1 drive uses one lane.

im not sure if its better more efficient to run 2x cards with 2 ports and run 2 cables from each into the 4 drives though.

DELL-Sam L · Answer

Hello Klimon,

If you are using 4 drives then you are going to want to have 2 SAS HBA’s as well. You can try to put all 4 drives on the same HBA & it should work without an issue.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

PowerVault

TL 4000 SAS connection issues.

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